The Armstrong Kessler Mansion (formerly known as Armstrong House) is a nationally significant example of

Italian Renaissance Revival Renaissance Revival architecture (sometimes referred to as "Neo-Renaissance") is a group of 19th century architectural revival styles which were neither Greek Revival nor Gothic Revival but which instead drew inspiration from a wide range o ...

architectural style located in the

Savannah Historic District Savannah Historic District may refer to: *Savannah Historic District (Savannah, Georgia), a National Historic Landmark district in Georgia * Central of Georgia Railroad: Savannah Shops and Terminal Facilities, Savannah, Georgia, a historic district ...

. The structure was built between 1917 and 1919 for the home of Savannah magnate George Ferguson Armstrong (1868–1924). It was owned by the Armstrong family from 1919 to 1935. Afterward, the structure and grounds served as the campus of Armstrong Junior College. Threatened with demolition, the Historic Savannah Foundation purchased the Armstrong House along with five other threatened historic buildings from the college for $235,000 in 1967. Once saved, Historic Savannah Foundation then sold the Mansion (and Hershel V. Jenkins Hall) at the exact purchase price to preservationist and antique dealer Jim Williams who restored it as his home. Eventually, both were sold to a major Savannah law firm as offices. The mansion was featured in ''The American Architect'' in 1919, and listed in ''A Field Guide to American Houses'' in 1984.

George Ferguson Armstrong

Armstrong was chief executive of Strachan Shipping Company, Savannah Marine Brokers; president of the Mutual Mining Company, extractors and shippers of Florida phosphate; and a director of the Hibernia Bank and of the Commercial Life Insurance and Casualty Company. He was a member of the Oglethorpe Club and the Savannah Cotton Exchange. Armstrong died from lung cancer in 1924, six years after the construction of his mansion.''Stories Set in Stone: Savannah and Her Unique Architecture''
– ''

Savannah Morning News The ''Savannah Morning News'' is a daily newspaper in Savannah, Georgia. It is published by Gannett. The motto of the paper is "Light of the Coastal Empire and Lowcountry". The paper serves Savannah, its metropolitan area, and parts of South Ca ...

'' special publication In 1935, widow Lucy Camp Armstrong Moltz and daughter Lucy Armstrong Johnson donated the property for the campus of Armstrong Junior College at the request of the City of Savannah.

Location and site

The Armstrong Kessler Mansion is located in Savannah's National Historic Landmark District at 447 Bull Street across from

Forsyth Park Forsyth Park (formerly known as the Military Parade Ground)''Charles Seton Henry Hardee's Recollections of old Savannah'', Martha Gallaudet Waring, ''The Georgia Historical Quarterly'', JSTOR (1929), p. 34 is a large city park that occupies in ...

. It is in Monterey Ward (the center of which is Monterey Square), one of twenty-four wards laid out in the form of James Oglethorpe's original town plan. Other notable structures on Bull Street in Monterey Ward are the Mercer House and Temple Mickve Israel. Six city lots were acquired to build the Armstrong mansion, and two existing houses were demolished to make room for the 26,000 square foot structure. The entire site, including carriage house and grounds, is 0.5 acres.

Original design

The mansion was designed by the architect

Henrik Wallin Henrik Wallin (October 9, 1873 – January 28, 1936) was a Savannah, Georgia-based architect. He was born in Rodviken, Nordmaling, Sweden in 1873. He designed some works that are included on the National Register of Historic Places within histo ...

(1873-1936) in 1917 in an

style with interior elements of various established and experimental styles. The ten-bedroom home has nearly 26,000 square feet of living area. It is three stories over a full garden level with Granite balustraded terraces at each level. A broad hemicycle colonnade extending toward Bull Street offers a prospect of

. Other design features include a

porte-cochère A porte-cochère (; , late 17th century, literally 'coach gateway'; plural: porte-cochères, portes-cochères) is a doorway to a building or courtyard, "often very grand," through which vehicles can enter from the street or a covered porch-like ...

that opens into a side garden, an

orangery An orangery or orangerie was a room or a dedicated building on the grounds of fashionable residences of Northern Europe from the 17th to the 19th centuries where orange and other fruit trees were protected during the winter, as a very large ...

loggia In architecture, a loggia ( , usually , ) is a covered exterior gallery or corridor, usually on an upper level, but sometimes on the ground level of a building. The outer wall is open to the elements, usually supported by a series of columns ...

, and sunporch. Exterior materials are granite and glazed brick. Bronze entry doors were fabricated by Bonachek of New York, with other doors in steel with bronze hardware. Windows were fabricated of steel and bronze by International Casement Company, now Hope Windows, which features the home in their promotional materials. The attached carriage house was also three stories, having two garage bays designed for automobiles with front and rear entrances from the street or from the alley (or “lane” as they are called in Savannah). Living quarters were between and above the garages. The street entrances thus approached the carriage house through the garden creating a circular drive, with one side passing through the porte-cochere. The landscape plan consisted of two formal yards on either side of a wide graduated approach to the front entrance, orchestrated to match the grandeur of the main hall. The effect in front carried through to the rear, where a second entrance under the porte-cochere faced a large rear garden. Front and rear grounds were enclosed with 200 feet of ornate iron fencing resembling that of

Buckingham Palace Buckingham Palace () is a London royal residence and the administrative headquarters of the monarch of the United Kingdom. Located in the City of Westminster, the palace is often at the centre of state occasions and royal hospitality. It ...

Interior design

The main hall was designed with Italian limestone claddings with ornate plaster ceilings and cornices. Floor-length windows, cornices, panels, friezes, and details reflecting a range of styles are found throughout the interior. Rooms drew from various period styles including

Georgian Georgian may refer to: Common meanings * Anything related to, or originating from Georgia (country) ** Georgians, an indigenous Caucasian ethnic group ** Georgian language, a Kartvelian language spoken by Georgians **Georgian scripts, three scrip ...

, Adamesque, Jacobean, and even

Arts and Crafts A handicraft, sometimes more precisely expressed as artisanal handicraft or handmade, is any of a wide variety of types of work where useful and decorative objects are made completely by one’s hand or by using only simple, non-automated re ...

. The house was fully electrified, and had a central vacuum system, recirculating hot water, and a ten port shower in the master bathroom.

Modifications

With the acquisition of the Armstrong mansion in 1935 for the home of a city college, initially named Armstrong Junior College, the need for facilities led to the demolition of most of the carriage house and gardens and construction of Herschel V. Jenkins Hall, also designed by Henrik Wallin. When the property became the offices of the law firm of Bouhan, Williams & Levy in 1970, Herschel V. Jenkins Hall was demolished to make room for parking. Numerous non-structural modifications were made throughout to accommodate the law practice. With the restoration of the property begun in 2017 (see below), the gardens and a portion of the carriage house has been recreated.

In popular culture

The Armstrong Kessler Mansion setting has appeared frequently in popular culture. The house was used as the school of the daughter of the protagonist in ''Cape Fear'', the 1962 psychological thriller starring

Robert Mitchum Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 – July 1, 1997) was an American actor. He rose to prominence with an Academy Award nomination for the Best Supporting Actor for ''The Story of G.I. Joe'' (1945), followed by his starring in ...

Gregory Peck Eldred Gregory Peck (April 5, 1916 – June 12, 2003) was an American actor and one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1970s. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Peck the 12th-greatest male star of Classic Hollywood ...

Martin Balsam Martin Henry Balsam (November 4, 1919 – February 13, 1996) was an American actor. He had a prolific career in character roles in film, in theatre, and on television. An early member of the Actors Studio, he began his career on the New ...

, and

Polly Bergen Polly Bergen (born Nellie Paulina Burgin; July 14, 1930 – September 20, 2014) was an American actress, singer, television host, writer and entrepreneur. She won an Emmy Award in 1958 for her performance as Helen Morgan in ''The Helen Mo ...

. The house also appeared as the real-life law office of attorney

Sonny Seiler Frank W. Seiler (born February 20, 1933) is a retired trial attorney from Savannah, Georgia, who had a leading role in the true-crime book ''Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil''. He is also the owner of the University of Georgia Bulldogs liv ...

in the film ''Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil'', a 1997 American crime drama film based on the novel by

John Berendt John Berendt (born December 5, 1939) is an American author, known for writing the best-selling non-fiction book ''Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil'', which was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. Biography Ber ...

and directed by

Clint Eastwood Clinton Eastwood Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American actor and film director. After achieving success in the Western TV series '' Rawhide'', he rose to international fame with his role as the "Man with No Name" in Sergio Leone's "''Doll ...

Restoration

The present owner, the preservationist-hotelier Richard C. Kessler, who acquired the mansion in 2017, commissioned a complete restoration of the Armstrong property. The structure, interior, and Italianate landscape are being restored as closely as possible to the original design with original materials. The architect and urban designer Christian Sottile developed the master plan for restoration. Interiors have been carried out by the designer Chuck Chewning. The plan includes a two-story recreation of the carriage house and the addition of a reflecting pool centered on the carriage house. The porte-cochere,

carriage house A carriage house, also called a remise or coach house, is an outbuilding which was originally built to house horse-drawn carriages and the related tack. In Great Britain the farm building was called a cart shed. These typically were open f ...

, and garden pavilion frame a formal garden with fountains and Italian cypresses.Sottile, “Armstrong Mansion” video documentation.

Notes

Bibliography

*“House of George F. Armstrong, Savannah, Georgia.” ''The American Architect''. Vol. CXVI, No. 2276, August 6, 1919. *Kigar, Taylor. “Houses with History.” Savannah.com. Posted on August 15, 2014 http://www.savannah.com/houses-with-history/ *McAlester, Virginia and Lee McAlester. ''A Field Guide to American Houses''. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. *Nussbaum, Katie. “A century of Savannah history: Richard Kessler returning Armstrong mansion to residential roots.” ''Savannah Morning News'' online, February 3, 2018. https://www.savannahnow.com/news/2018-02-03/century-savannah-history-richard-kessler-returning-armstrong-mansion-residential (accessed March 1, 2019). *“Savannah Scenes: Cape Fear (1962).” Bonnie Blue Tours Blog. https://www.bonniebluetours.com/blog/2013/09/04/savannah-scenes-1-cape-fear-1962 (accessed March 5, 2019). *Sottile, Christian. “Armstrong Kessler Mansion - Renovation of A Savannah Icon.” Video documentation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwefrBGL70c (accessed March 5, 2019). *Stone, Janet D. ''From the Mansion to the University: A History of Armstrong Atlantic State University 1935-2010''. Savannah, Ga.: Armstrong Atlantic State University, 2010.

External links

{{Commons category, Armstrong Mansion (Savannah)
Armstrong Kessler Mansion history and restoration video documentation
- YouTube, June 6, 2018 Buildings and structures completed in 1917 Office buildings in Savannah, Georgia Houses in Savannah, Georgia Savannah Historic District